In the second of our series of blogs, Vicky Glynn discusses how cloud has become mainstream and organisations no longer have the fear of missing out.

43% of the Scottish organisations Brightsolid surveyed in our 2019 State of the Nation survey described their cloud journey as mainstream.

The consideration of cloud as mainstream is not because organisations have fully completed their moves to the cloud. Gartner predicts that by 2022 cloud shift across key enterprise IT markets with increase to 28% up from 19% in 2018).  So, organisations are still in the process of moving.  Neither is it a reflection of a reduction in the pressure to move to cloud: IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Survey revealed that 38% of the respondents believed IT departments feel pressure to migrate 100% to the cloud.

I believe that much of the consideration of Cloud as mainstream is that CTO’s and other C-Level executives have matured past the fear of missing out on the cloud. In 2017, surveys conducted (such as the Commvault ‘Executive Cloud Survey’) were reporting that large amounts of C-Level and other IT leaders were feeling ‘extremely or very concerned about missing out on cloud advancements’. There was a myth-making machine around cloud that seemed to suggest that only ‘pure cloud’ (clouds provided by hyperscale providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google) that could address large scale, global, real time provisioning needs were good clouds.

Understanding of Cloud has matured over recent years and the hyperbole over the technology has been mitigated by (equally hyperbolic) stories of excessive costs, cloud repatriation, concerns over security. Such stories perpetuate today, for example recent media coverage of Lyft’s $300 million spend with AWS has an aura of scaremongering and click bait, more connected to the rumours of an acquisition than true concerns about cloud spend.  CTO’s and IT Managers have become immune to the latest scare story or the latest promise of nirvana and instead are treating cloud in the same way they would treat any IT infrastructure investment.

IT infrastructure is intrinsic to delivering real business value and CTOs are ever more on the hook to justify technology through business outcomes, they are used to making decisions on how technologies best fulfil the different performance, price and functionality requirements of a business. Cloud is no different, and therefore it’s now simply part of the mainstream activity for any CTO.